ChBE Assistant Professor Dr. Sankar Nair has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his work entitled "Engineered Nanoscopic Objects via Controlled Creation and Rearrangement of Amorphous Nanoparticles."

ABOUT DR. NAIR
Dr. Nair directs the Nanomaterials and Nanoengineering research group in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. The research of his group has important potential applications in several areas including biomolecule sensing, energy management, and separations. Analytical chemical engineering fundamentals are carefully combined with synthetic chemistry, mechanistic experiments, theory, and simulation methods, to develop synthesis-structure-property relationships of technological and fundamental interest.

Dr. Nair also teaches a unique course: "Chemical Engineering in Nanoscale Systems," which explores the principles underlying the fabrication and analysis of nanotechnological materials and devices produced by chemical processing strategies.

ABOUT DR. NAIR'S NSF CAREER PLAN
The long-term objective of Dr. Nair's career plan is to develop and demonstrate a generalized enabling framework of principles for the design and reaction engineering of ultra-small metal oxide objects of complex morphology and structure.

Specifically, he proposes to understand and manipulate the novel mechanisms and thermodynamics that govern the liquid-phase engineering of a unique class of single-walled mixed oxide nanotubes (with exceptionally small lengths of 20-100 nm and diameters 2-4 nm) and single-walled nanoshells (with diameter < 5 nm), all with complex and ordered internal structures. The ability to engineer the shape, size, structure, and composition of nanoscopic metal oxide objects at very small length scales